Two recent milestones in the Iraq war — the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and 4,000 U.S. military deaths — have a very personal meaning for artist Emily Prince.
A year after the United States launched its initial attack against targets in Iraq, the Berkeley graduate student resolved to draw a portrait of each U.S. service person who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with other locations related to the two war fronts.
At latest count, she’d done 4,510 of these drawings — in what has become a regular practice that feels “somewhat akin to prayer” to her.
“As it’s always been in this project, I’m just continually trying to catch up,” says Prince, now finishing a master’s degree program in art practice.
One face she rendered recently — that of Army Spc. Keisha M. Morgan — “really made an impression” on the artist. “She was 25 and from Washington, D.C. Her face was glowing,” Prince recalls. “Her eyes are etched into my memory.” One of 74 servicewomen whom Prince has portrayed, Morgan died Feb. 22 in Baghdad of a “non-combat-related cause.”
Prince assembles faces of fallen troops to form a map of the United States, for a work she has titled American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, Nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis). Last year, the piece was chosen for display at the 2007 Venice Biennale, a major international exhibition. This summer it will be part of a show at the Wanas Foundation in Sweden, and it later will travel to the Saatchi Gallery in London.
When Prince began her memorial project, in the fall of 2004, “I really never projected how long I might be making these drawings for, or how many I would make,” she recalls. “The situation is complex, far beyond my capacity to predict its future,” she adds. “Sadly, I won’t be surprised if I’m still drawing them in 10 years.”
